Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve access to face-to-face talking therapies for people with mental health problems.

This Government is committed to improving access and waiting time standards for psychological therapies.

As set out in NHS England’s Implementing the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health, we aim to deliver increased access to psychological therapies by 2020/21, so that at least 1.5 million people with common mental health conditions access services each year. The aim is for the majority of new services to be integrated with physical healthcare, and as part of this expansion, for 3,000 new mental health therapists will be co-located in primary care.

The Five Year Forward Review for mental health is available at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/fyfv-mh.pdf

We also continue to exceed performance against our waiting time standards for access to psychological therapies. Latest figures from May 2018 showed that, of those people who completed a course of Improving Access to Psychological Therapies treatment, 89.6% waited less than six weeks to enter treatment and 99.0% waited less than 18 weeks.

The latest recovery rate for psychological therapies in May 2018 was 52.8%, exceeding the 50% target.